The tread came off the Scot’s still inflated left rear tire in second practice but Di Resta was able to bring the car safely to a halt.

With drivers expressing safety concerns, Pirelli motorsport director Paul Hembery said the Italian company would investigate the issue.

“It obviously doesn’t look pretty when you’ve the tread coming away like that,” he told reporters at the Circuit de Catalunya.

”Last year if we had failures it tended to collapse the tire on to the rim so it still didn’t look good. This year we are seeing the tread coming away so visually it looks rubbish. I don’t like that.

“We’re looking at it and seeing if there are things we can do to eliminate it,” said Hembery.

Pirelli have come under fire this season for introducing new compounds, that wear and lose performance quickly, to help increase the number of pit stops and liven up the strategy.

However there have been a number of failures, including one sudden deflation that led to Mercedes’s Lewis Hamilton collecting a penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change in Bahrain.

“The tire was still inflated from what I could see,” said Hembery of the latest incident. “The structure didn’t give way, and that’s what we’ve seen in a few other cases, that the tread is overheating and coming away.”